The Grail of Sir Thomas

The door was shaking. A crack emerged in it, wide enough to drive a finger, but the heavy chest, with its edge stuck in the hollow between the floor boards, prevented it from flying open. Someone squeezed his fingers through the crack, fumbled around in search of the obstacle to remove it. Oleg snarled, grabbed Thomas with both arms.

“Sir wonderer,” the knight protested in great indignation, “I can’t leave you!”

With an angry groan, Oleg hurled him out through the window. Terrified, Thomas felt falling into the black abyss. He clutched convulsively at the rope, felt a forceful jerk at his iron collar behind: the wonderer kept him from coming down upon the thin rope with all his weight at once….

The last thing Thomas heard was a crack of boards followed by triumphant screams of legionaries. He slid on, suspended by his belt to the fine thread. It quivered, hardly able to bear his weight. His thick gauntleted fingers slid, as though soaped, on the smooth rope, which ringed like a tightly drawn crossbow string. Thomas felt sick as he imagined the thread bursting with a crack and him, a noble crusader knight in his steel, collapsing from the height of the fifth floor on the stone slabs, crunching against them like a lobster, his brain splashing around…

In terror, he took a firmer grip and dragged himself on into the darkness, along the invisible salutary thread, his eyes burnt with sticky, disgustingly bitter sweat. Then he was thunderstruck by a dreadful thought: was he moving in the right direction? The turns and tugs before… He had to hurry: the rope was too thin to endure two men. Sir wonderer is beating off the legionaries who broke into the room! He may already be wounded or killed. It’s all my fault!

He howled with terror and impotence of a noble Angle who felt lost in the night over a street in Constantinople. Almost a barbarian city as compared to Rome. He bowed his head, trying to see the wall of the house, but his metal collar, made to protect the neck from swords, impeded to turn it. He heard a patter of high heels far below, a playful woman’s giggle answered by a deep-voiced laughter of a well-fed Romay. Thomas swung over them, his head gurgling, as well as his stomach. He imagined himself falling down before those strolling clods and felt so sick he couldn’t help vomitting. Below, there were still giggles, jokes, clatter of high heels. With the last of his strength, Thomas dragged himself along the rope. Even if the direction was wrong, he would help valiant sir wonderer in his last mortal battle, instead of hanging on that damned rope like a dump caterpillar in a spider’s web!

His body struck against a hard surface. He felt it, found iron rods, wriggled to grip the salutary metal, which the Romays used to guard their windows, with both hands. His foot found a crack between the stone blocks that formed the house. The heart beat frequently, thumping not on his ribs but on his iron armor.

On the other side of the metal rods, , there was a dark shape of thick iron bolt pressed tightly against them. The stretched rope was tied to it! Thomas sobbed, leaving his terror behind, muttered a slack curse for the wonderer who told him nothing, gave no warning, so he was pursued all the way by the vision of the arrowhead coming out of the wall and him, Thomas Malton of Gisland, falling like a toad, with his limbs spread wide apart, in the middle of the street… Foolishly, he thought the bolt should have been stuck into the wall, and he could not imagine the force needed to drive it so that to endure a big man in full knightly armor!

Suddenly, the rope started to shake violently. The figure of the wonderer emerged from the darkness, running on a tightly stretched rope, as if it were a log, his outstretched arms rocking from side to side, the two- handed sword and stuffed bag in hands.

He took a running jump on the grating, clung to it for a moment, the sword flashed and hid behind his back, the bag shifted onto his shoulders. Thomas wanted to undo the belt that fastened him to the rope but he dared not to release the rods. He tried to drive away the very thought of him, an expert in jousting, hanging on the wall on fifth floor, like a March cat, above the stone-paved street.

A knife flashed in the wonderer’s hand, the rope burst under the blade, fell into the dark. Across the street, there was a shriek, then a heavy stroke on stone, as if a sack of wet clay dropped on the pavement.

“What’s now?” Thomas asked in a scared whisper. “Gnaw at the grating?”

“What are we to do in a woman’s bedroom?” Oleg grimaced. “If there was the procurator’s daughter… but it’s his granny! We’ll better get into the window below.”

“The procurator’s daughter is there?”

“Shame on you, Sir Thomas! Krizhina’s waiting for you. Poor girl! If only she knew what you are dreaming of…”

He vanished in the dark. Thomas heard a screech below, as if rust was scratched away, then an irritated whisper. “Sir Thomas, wake up. Stop dreaming of the procurator’s daughter!”

Thomas hung on the tips of his fingers and toes, playing a spider. He was hot in his armor, like in the Hell’s stove, his limbs trembling, numb fingers about to unclench. Suddenly some hooked paw emerged from the darkness below, seized him by leg. He all but fell off in panics, but managed to slide down, with a support from below.

The wonderer was on the windowsill. He got a better grip on the knight’s belt and dragged him, with a screech of iron on iron, through the ruined grating: only the topmost and the lowest of its horizontal rods were undamaged, while all the vertical ones had either vanished or got terribly bent sideways.

They collapsed into the dark room and stiffened. The house was silent, save for muffled bangs on a copper caldron far below, and a dog barking: an old and lazy one, judging by the sound.

“The hirelings are now running upstairs,” Thomas supposed. With effort, he got up to his shaking feet, brought his trembling hands to his face. He felt cold and heavy in stomach as if he’d swallowed a block of ice or a frozen sheatfish. Meanwhile, Oleg ran about the room, stepping as silently as a giant cat, touched the door, set it ajar to look out. A strip of crimson light fell in from the corridor. They smelt smoke of a tar torch.

“They don’t hear,” Oleg said. “First they should guess where we are. I’ve cut the rope! Its end reaches the ground. That’s what they see from the room — and think we’ve climbed down the rope. And silence below, no shouts nor noise, means their sentries have missed us, or we bribed them. While they sort it out and whack the guilty ones, we can take a breath and get away.”

“Sir wonderer, I’d rather get away without taking a breath!”

“Is something up?” Oleg wondered.

“Yes. When you cut the rope, someone was climbing it!”

Oleg shook his head in astonishment. “Oh, brave they are… You, sir knight, are a different pair of shoes: a true hero. Another man like you can hardly be found in all the Britain, and I can’t believe in more of such heroes found in two thousand miles away… Well, you’re right. We must get away.”

Thomas felt flattered, even his legs stopped trembling. Oleg opened the door wider, looked out and stepped there. The sack on his back made him a likeness of a giant turtle, and the sword hilt and the bow, sticking out on a level with his ears, changed that into a scary creature of night.

Thomas slipped out after the wonderer, glancing at him with shame. He took the larger part of our common load again.

They walked along the broad corridor lit by oil lamps in copper bowls on the walls decorated with colored panels, its floor of expensive marble with intricate patterns. On both sides, there were massive doors of valuable sorts of wood, with decorative carving, ornate copper handles, gleaming nails with broad patterned heads. Behind one of them, they heard laughter, merry voices of women. Oleg stopped there and listened — a hermit indeed! — while Thomas all but died of anxiety, glancing back at the long empty corridor, where, despite the late night, a guard, a servant, or a late guest could show up at every moment…

The stairs were seen at the very end. Thomas ran up to them after the wonderer, trying to be silent the same, but his iron feet made a terrible thunder that caused the whole great bulk of a stone house to shake, the lamps to twinkle with fear, the splendid portraits of noble ancestors to jump and drop pieces of paint.

Thundering like an avalanche coming from the peak of Himalayas, Thomas darted after the wonderer to the floor below. They hid in a draped niche to let some dark figures pass by. It was hot and stuffy there, fine dust filled their nostrils. Thomas tried to hold his nose, but the gauntlet banged, very loud in that deathly silence, on his lowered visor. Thomas froze, not daring to move, heard the steps stop near him. His nose was itching unbearably, and he sneezed with all his might, thinking of nothing in the world but the excruciating itch. I just couldn’t help it.

In the faint light that penetrated through the heavy curtain, he saw a flash of sword nearby, heard the wonderer’s constrained breath. The steps on the other side came close. “Ektius, did you hear it?” a soft voice said in astonishment.

“I’m damned if I didn’t!” a different voice replied. It seemed to belong to an older man. “I